Yana Dimitrova "Tomorrow & Tomorrow"
MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects
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Miyako Yoshinaga Art Prospects presents recent works by artist Yana Dimitrova. The title of the show, Tomorrow & Tomorrow, references a line from Macbeth by William Shakespeare, which contemplates the banality and insignificance of life. In her paintings and installations, Dimitrova portrays the mundane patterns and structures of everyday experience in order to critique the self-reverential nature of one's desires.
The series of paintings, "I Love Life and Life Loves Me," is based on a Bulgarian popular YouTube music video. After watching the clip repeatedly, Dimitrova painted some of the stills off the computer screen. The paintings depict the ideals presented by the singer in the video, who has everything he desires from life. The blurry out-of-focus treatment combined with a cool color palette conveys a vacant, artificial environment.
Dimitrova's landscapes counter the capitalist dream of monetary gain and opportunity for all. In one painting, highway billboards are whitewashed signifying an absence of opportunity. In another, the Coex Mall in Seoul, Korea - one of the largest malls in the world - is eerily empty. When stripped of the barrage of advertising that shapes modern man's desires, what remains is literally a hollow monument to consumer culture.
The installation, "The Greatest Achievements," is a larger-than-life checklist that borrows symbols from a smart-phone organizational tool. Brighter checkboxes suggest urgency, and darker ones define more common day-to-day tasks. The piece represents the cyclical process of proposing a task, creating a box, achieving the task, checking the box, and adding new tasks. In addition, it shows that the checkbox is in fact the task itself, which by its creation is simultaneously achieved, suggesting the ineffectuality of daily activity. Thus Tomorrow & Tomorrow questions the proposed values of everyday experiences, presenting liminal sites in which a sense of self and the possibility for happiness are impossible.
[Image: Yana Dimitrova "Dreams" (2010) oil on canvas, 72 x 77 in.]
Media
Schedule
from June 02, 2011 to July 09, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-06-02 from 18:00 to 20:00